I would get a free trip to NY if I made it to the final round. And I tried to make my trips start on Thursday and extend to Monday so I could meet senior bankers on weekdays and junior bankers on weekends.

Q: I’m not sure if it’s “unethical”; I guess it depends on how many times you did it.

A: I took 2 weekend trips out of 4 total using this strategy, so I thought it was reasonable.

And I wasn’t completely uninterested in the roles – I just saw them as “backup plans” in case I couldn’t win a front-office role for my sophomore summer and wanted to get a better name on my resume.

Q: Sure. So if you spoke with 178 people and met a few dozen, how many did you stay in touch with?

A: Around 20 of them turned into good contacts who were willing to answer questions and who could make a serious push to help me win interviews.

I dropped anyone who left their firm, and I often contacted multiple people in the same group and then focused on the person I connected with the best.

Networking Challenges

Q: You also mentioned that you ran into some challenges in winning interviews at banks.

What happened, and how did you respond?

A: One time, I emailed a senior banker at an elite boutique and sent my usual pitch.

He responded with: “We don’t recruit at your school, and you wouldn’t stand a chance even if we did.”

So I focused on those firms and skipped the middle markets and regional boutiques, at least initially.

I started reaching out in the middle of July for summer internships starting the next year.

I attached my resume to each email and wrote a message like:

SUBJECT: Follow-up – [University Name] Student – Summer Internships

“[Name],

I hope all is well. Just as a reminder, we spoke [XX] months/weeks ago, and you told me about your experience in the [XX] group at your firm. I’m currently seeking investment banking internships for next summer, and I just wanted to know if you’d be willing to pass along my resume (attached here).

Thanks,

[My Name]”

I ended up focusing on elite boutiques, and most of my interviews were at EBs as well.

I focused on EBs because the work seemed more interesting, and I got along better with bankers at those firms.

Q: So do you think non-target students have an advantage at elite boutiques?

But you shouldn’t apply exclusively to the elite boutiques – I still went through the process at several bulge-bracket firms because interviews can be incredibly random and EB analyst classes are still relatively small compared with those at larger banks.

I definitely recommend diversifying the banks that you network with. As with investing, if you put all your eggs in one basket, you could fail to get the job for reasons outside of your control.

Insurmountable Interviews?

Q: Speaking of interviews, what were the biggest challenges you faced?

Did you have to answer a lot of objections about your university?

A: Not really.

One person did ask the “Why you rather than everyone else?” question, but I answered that by using a response similar to my counter-email above: I’ve always saved management teams time and made their lives easier, and I’ve gained significant accounting and finance skills from past work experience and the CFA exam.

The bulge-bracket interviews were very straightforward. They asked the usual questions on Depreciation, WACC and Cost of Equity, how to walk through a DCF, etc.

A: One interviewer asked me, “What’s the average Cost of Equity for a tech company in the S&P 500?”

You don’t have the data to answer that off the top of your head, but they want to see your thought process rather than the exact answer.

So I said, “The Risk-Free Rate is around 1.55% for 10-year U.S. Treasuries. A tech company like Salesforce is more volatile than the market as a whole, with a Beta of around 1.5. So if you assume an Equity Risk Premium of 8%, Cost of Equity might be 13.55%.”

About the Author

Brian DeChesare is the Founder of Mergers & Inquisitions and Breaking Into Wall Street. In his spare time, he enjoys memorizing obscure Excel functions, editing resumes, obsessing over TV shows, traveling like a drug dealer, and defeating Sauron.

Comments

Everything about this article is amazing. I didin’t read it – I just swallowed it in a few minutes. It’s more like a teaser of a good book. I admire such determination and not-giving up attitude. I may say that this article is very inspiring but also a little bit demotivating. I am girl who has her first internship in an investment banking approaching but it made me aware what a long way I have to go through. What division should I choose to make me cv more attractive (my next goal is internship abroad), derivatives, Risk, pricing or hedge fund accounting?

Those are not really IB roles but are more on the S&T or public markets side. And the answer is that it depends on what you want to do in the future – Sales/trading? M&A? Private equity? Hedge funds? It’s tough to answer your question without knowing your goals. Overall, derivatives is best if you want to work in an actually trading role at a bank, prop trading firm, or hedge fund.

I did some networking with investment bankers from Hong Kong and made good rapport with them. Unfortunately, I did not pass the resume screening process for most of the firms. I want to keep the relationships with the bankers. In this case, should I inform my situation to the bankers? If so what should I say?

I wouldn’t frame it like that, just tell them that you remain interested in their firm but have pursued opportunities in [Other Field] for now, and it would be great if you could get their advice for any future applications to their firm.

A target school is one that all the top banks recruit at on-campus. In Canada, the main target universities for IB are Ivey, Rotman, Queens, Schulich, and McGill. You can get in if you don’t go to one of those, but it will be harder, mostly because the industry in Canada is so much smaller.

I do remember I made it past a second round interview to a final round in a Canadian bank probably because of one sentence at the bottom of my resume saying I played poker recreationally. Towards the end of the interview, one guy asked me what I would do in some scenario (can’t remember exactly now) and my answer was essentially to buy the pot with an aggressive bet. They liked my combativeness and that basically sealed that round.

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